Silicon Minds: The Alan Turing Centennial

Silicon Minds: Alan Turing was born on June 23, 1912. Well before World War II he conceived of a machine which could compute and it was a machine that, although an abstraction, could solve problems. It was a monumental achievement on par with the framing of relativity and atomic discoveries, though no one at the time realized it. Deservedly, he is called the father of computer science. But he was the son of proper British parents and a brother to a man who wrestled with accepting Alan’s homosexuality. Cambridge University Press has republished the 1959 biography of Alan Turing written by his mother, Sara, in view of the 100th anniversary of his birth. On this Silicon Minds episode we talk with David Tranah, editorial director for mathematics and computer science at Cambridge University Press, who helped get the book republished.

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